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Saturday, August 06, 2016

Rebeca’s Choice

The house isn’t on a hill. I think
that’s it. Part of it. But I don’t know. One by one, everyone
just moved away toward the cities. I hear news, though I’m still
not sure how it works anymore. But my solitude no longer contains
silence, even if no one has been here in at least ten years. The
house sits vacant, and nothing else was developed in the valley. The
orchard was going to become lots, but everyone moved away. I don’t
think it was my fault, but I don’t know. Some things are hazy.
Distant, like the memories of a stranger I once was.

Sometimes I don’t recognize myself in
mirrors. I’ve learned to cope. I’ve even learned to drown out the
sounds of the world, the signals in the air just background noises
like the ocean grinding against the shore. Which is why I don’t
notice him until he comes inside. The boy is alone with a glowing
phone in one hand, wearing shoes meant for hiking. I know of cell
phones, though until now I’d never seen one. He cleans off glasses.
It is raining outside. I hadn’t noticed.

“H-Hello?” he
says, his voice trying to be loud. “Is anyone here? My name is
Damien, but everyone calls me Dami. I’m just here to find a
haunter?”

I manifest. I don’t normally, but it
has been years and he came without the machines and incense and
crystals the others came with long ago. And the deepest parts of me
like to see them run.

Dami stares at me. I don’t know what
I look like to the living. I have had some run screaming. Some weep.
A few faint. This boy just looks offended. “You’re a gastly?”
he demands.

“I know you’re a Gengar. And a
Haunter is better than a Gengar any day. Do I need to level you up?”

“... what?” My voice is strange
even to my ears. Even the insane would break and run by now, but
there is something within him resisting me.

“Wait, the app update doesn’t
mention –.” I have no idea what the boy is talking about, but I
see the moment when he flatters, realizing I am real. Humans like to
pretend ghosts exist, but they don’t truly like to encounter us and
have realize the world they built their lives around isn’t how they
understood it to be at all.

“My name is Rebeca.” I think it was
that, at least once.

“You’re not a haunter? I really
need one for my pokedex.”

“I am the spirit that haunts this
place.”

“I know that,”
Dami says. “But I really need to find a haunter.” And he turns
his phone toward me, showing an image I don’t understand at all. I
do hear the phone. Noises coming from it, into it. This is how the
world speaks to me though I am here. In energies passing between
phones and other places.

I am not sure what
to make of this. “I am the only ghost in his valley.”

I am certain of
that much. I think there were others, once. But there is only me
left.

“Do you play
pokemon?” he asks.

“I have no idea
what you are talking about.”

Dami
grins. He grins at that, in delight. Delight.
“Mom and Dad won’t come
looking for me for hours. They generally take a long time to anyway,”
he says, dusting off one of the couches to sit down on it. “I can
teach you how to play it, if you want? You could help me capture a
lot of pokemon, Rebeca.”

I have been dead
for a long time, and a ghost for perhaps even longer. I draw my
nature about me. I can kill, with the cold between places. I can pull
a human into the darkness and leave nothing behind. I have done this
before. The memory of doing it hovers about me, whispers in voices I
almost know.

“Please?” he
says. “There aren’t any other pokemon here and teaching someone
new will help me remember things too.”

There are shadows
in his eyes he doesn’t own. Darkness he somehow sidesteps, and this
– this pokemon is the why of it, the how and the means. It is not a
power I know or understand, but he stands in the house of hauntings,
and I swear I feel smaller. Not in a way that hurts, but still
smaller in directions I can feel but not name.

It has been so long
since a human came here. So long since my hunger was sated. But he
offers his faith as a meal without knowing, and it has no end that I
can feel at all.

“Tell me,” I
say, and he begins to explain pokemon, and has to explain his phone,
and television, and he talks for so long and so fast I am almost
wondering if he is going to talk until he keels over and becomes a
ghost as well when he gets a message on his phone.

“Oh! I didn’t
get a new achievement, but Mom and Dad are looking for me.” He
bounces to his feet. “I should find them before they try and take
my phone away.”

Not before they get
worried. Not before they get scared. He understands his parents even
if he does not understand them at all. “They are not good pokemon
trainers, then?” I say, using the words he has taught me.

“No. But I think
I can be, for you. If you want to learn more?” he asks, suddenly
shy.

I am not certain
who is more surprised when I say yes.

He
leaves, and is not a reflection I carry with my in the mirrors. I
walk the house. I float. I try and haunt, in the manner of the
haunters in pokemon, but his faith is not the kind to change another.
I dust the house, for the first time in many years. I remember
everything he has taught me. I think of questions to ask Damien the
next time we meet. And I wait.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”